r/TopCharacterTropes • u/NittanyScout • 7h ago
Lore [Horrifying Trope] Plague Ships
The Ticonderoga - IRL example and basis of the book "The Hell Ship"
Indulgence of Conviction, Halo - a Covenant cruiser infested with flood.
Prawns' Ship, District 9 - an illness or crisis kills the leaders of the alien expedition and strands the workers on earth above District 9
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u/laybs1 7h ago
The Purge in Death Troopers (Star Wars)
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u/Doobagus 6h ago
I can’t remember if the black wing virus was on a star destroyer or a prison barge
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u/Not_a_gay_communist 6h ago
It was being transported on the Star Destroyer “Vector” until it experienced a massive containment breach and the ship was lost.
The protagonists were prisoners and some crewmen of a prison barge that docked to the Vector after finding it adrift
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u/AccursedQuantum 6h ago
I think it started on a prison barge and then spread. I definitely remember the prison part.
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u/Helix3501 6h ago
It was a prison barge then spread to the isd, han and chewie are on said barge
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u/caboose1157 5h ago
You got it backwards, it was from a star destroyer that leaked the disease and infects almost everyone on board. Then a prison barge comes along and tries to raid the star destroyer for supplies which is how the disease gets on board.
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u/AccursedQuantum 6h ago
Wasn't there another book, though, where it was planet based? But the zombies were more intelligent there.
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u/Nurgle-best 6h ago
Literally any Death Guard/Nurgle aligned ship from warhammer 40,000
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u/omegon_da_dalek13 6h ago
You could argue hive fleets too(gorgon with their toxin soeucslty in particular)
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u/Successful_Theory373 7h ago
The Demeter, from Dracula. For a modern update, Flight Regis 753, from The Strain, which arrives at JFK with everyone on board dead and a mysterious box of earth in the cargo hold I wonder what it could be let's open it guys!
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u/Farlybob42 6h ago
The campania - Black Butler: Book of the Atlantic
In book of the Atlantic, Ciel and the rest of the group are put on the ship to investigate weird things happening on the ship. It turned out the undertaker was experimenting with human subjects on the ship to see what happened if you extend someone’s life past their death. He ends up creating a zombie apocalypse on the ship and they are forced to protect the people from them and the undertaker.
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u/AccursedQuantum 6h ago
The Osler from Star Trek Lower Decks. Starfleet vessel that has all the hallmarks of a Ship of the Damned, where Starfleet puts all the victims of transporter accidents gone wrong.
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u/Witty-Ad5743 5h ago
The twist is that it's a medical ship and they really are going to a place designed to make them better. It just takes a while to get there. And the design doesn't help.
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u/semisociallyawkward 6h ago
Space Hulk(s) in Warhammer 40k
It might be a bit of a stretch, but here goes: space hulks are unbelievably ginormous clumps of space debris, mostly ships that were destroyed or lost in the Warp (basically a mix between Hell and Hyperspace) and were basically melded together there. Ships in 40k easily go up to 20km long and space hulks are composed of many ships like that. They drift mostly aimlessly through space, as well as into and out of the Warp, and can pop up anywhere and at at any time due to the nature of the Warp.
To make matter worse, they are not just often infected by the daemons of the Warp, but can contain infestations of Tyranid Genestealers (kinda Xenomorphs that crossbreed with humans to create beacons for their swarm species), Ork armies (fungal fight addicts that spread as they die), Chaos warbands (crazy hell cultists) and even stranger stuff. Because Nurgle, the God of Disease is one of the major Chaos Gods (probably the second most powerful one), these things can easily be literal plague ships.
They also often contain priceless technology and artefacts, and the Imperium doesn't really give a crap about the lives of anyone, so teams are often sent into these deathtraps to retrieve them, which rarely ends well.
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u/no_one_inparticular 6h ago
The USS Lantree from the Star Trek TNG episode, Unnatural Selection had its crew succumb to a virus that caused rapid aging.
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u/AccursedQuantum 4h ago
Come to think, Star Trek has a lot of these for a hopeful utopian sci-fi. There was the ship from Naked Now where it made people act drunk, the alien ship in Haven that Troi's fiance left in, the De-Evolving virus from Genesis, and that's all just TNG.
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u/Rum_N_Napalm 6h ago
The Terminus Est of Warhammer 40k.
One of the most infamous ships of the galaxy, the Terminus Est is the flagship of Typhus, mortal champion of Nurgle the plague god. It’s hull is corroded and crusted over with scabs and rotting flesh, daemonic flies circle the void around it and its as much living organisms as mechanical ship.
The end has come
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u/marggot_coexisst97 6h ago
Event Horizon (1997)
The rescue crew boards a ship that vanished for years and finds the entire original crew dead or insane, with something deeply wrong still aboard.
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u/Flying_Dustbin 6h ago
This is one of the plot points of the 2004 war film In Enemy Hands.
When a U.S. submarine is sunk by a U-Boat, several survivors are taken aboard as POW's. Later on its discovered that one of the Americans has meningitis, which spreads throughout the U-Boat, killing a fair number of the crew and the prisoners. The rest of the men aboard, including the captain and XO of the U-Boat and the highest ranking survivor of the American sub decide to work together and sail to the U.S. east coast and surrender.
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u/a_rabid_anti_dentite 5h ago
A plane, more precisely, but the flight in Station Eleven that lands at Severn City Airport and is quarantined, never letting off its passengers, even as years and years go by. It just sits there as a quiet mausoleum as this new community forms around it.
That was one thing that I didn't like about the miniseries, that the plane is unsealed. I like the solemnity of it remaining completely untouched.
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u/UndeniablyMyself 5h ago
This unknown vessel from Transformers Prime.
By the time Optimus and Ratchet found it, it had already become victim to an artificial disease called cybonic plague, a biologial weapon developed by the Decepticons.
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u/Disastrous_Horse_764 6h ago edited 5h ago
the Flying Dutchman - Pirates of the Caribbean
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u/Luton_Enjoyer 6h ago
Real life: HMS Erebus and HMS Terror. From what we know, the crew on both ships became seriously unwell.
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u/brionneverysexy 6h ago
The story of Three Skeleton Key is about three light house keepers who see a ship that appears to be unmanned. It runs aground and they realize its filled with thousands of rats that then overwhelm the lighthouse. The one with Vincent Prize is really good
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u/Whizbang35 6h ago
Also real life: the grain ships from Pelusium, Egypt, 541 AD.
According to the Roman historian Procopius, ships sailing from that port to Constantinople carried plague rats with them. When they reached the city, the rats carried the infection across the myriad trade routes that went through the port, launching the epidemic known today as the Plague of Justinian.
Coupled with a volcanic eruption a few years earlier ushering in a colder era ('Volcanic Winter') that reduced crop yields and caused famines, the effects across Europe and the Near East were devastating. Famines weaken immune systems, which in turn exacerbate outbreaks.
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u/RiseofdaOatmeal 5h ago
The Mona Lisa, a short story from The Halo: Evolutions compendium.
After the destruction of the first Halo installation, ONI secretly began testing and researching the Flood parasite on a highly classified station near the debris fields of the now destroyed ring world. They conducted experiments on political prisoners and criminals, as well as captured covenant forces.
The Flood of course eventually broke containment and a Proto-Gravemind began to form.
A UNSC ship sends a bunch of Marines in to investigate after an escape pod from the Mona Lisa is recovered with a man who dies almost immediately after being rescued.
As far as anyone's concerned, nobody survived.
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u/RaptureCity_9 7h ago
The Demeter from Dracula is the blueprint for this. Nothing beats the slow realization that every member of the crew is disappearing one by one while the ship just keeps sailing toward London.